First, 'no data found' is not an exception, it just means there was no data found. Happens all the time :-) If you want your code to treat that as an exception, that's another matter handled inside your script.

For dealing with exceptions, a very common idiom is something like the following code. This uses the RaiseError attribute of the database handle to throw a die whenever we encounter a database error. (And as we've said, finding no matching rows isn't a database error.)

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use DBI;

my $last_name = 'user';
my $dbh = DBI->connect( 'DBI:mysql:mydb', 'cwinters', '',
                        { RaiseError => 1, PrintError => 0 } )
           || die "Cannot connect to database! Error: $DBI::errstr";
my $sql = qq/SELECT first_name, last_name, login_name 
               FROM sys_user
              WHERE last_name = ?/;
my ( $sth );
eval {
  $sth = $dbh->prepare( $sql );
  $sth->execute( $last_name );
};
if ( $@ ) {
  print "Could not execute database statement! (Error: $@)";
  $dbh->disconnect;
  exit;
}
print "Users with last name: $last_name\n", "=" x 40, "\n";
while ( my $row = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref ) {
  print "$row->[0] $row->[1] ($row->[2])\n";
}
$dbh->disconnect;
[download]

This gives the output:

Users with last name: user
========================================
Super User (superuser)
Joe User (joe)
test user (tester1)
[download]

However, if I change the SQL statement to:

my $sql = qq/SELECT first_name, last_name, login_name 
               FROM sys_user_bad_table_name  
              WHERE last_name = ?/;
[download]

I get something like:

Could not execute database statement! (Error: DBD::mysql::st 
execute failed: Table 'mydb.sys_user_bad_table_name' doesn't 
exist at pm_dbi_exception.pl line 16.)
[download]

The exact statement will, of course, depend on your database and driver. As I understand, Oracle has a vast set of codes used to indicate error conditions. If $@ exists after an eval block, you can inspect it with a regex to pull out that code and act appropriately.

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode